Botnets used by Russian Hackers to hack 1.2 billion Internet Passwords

Botnets: Russian hackers used it to hack internet passwords

A gang of Russian hackers based in a small city in South Central Russia, the region flanked by Kazakhstan and Mongolia, hacked about 1.2 billion passwords. They hacked internet passwords using botnets.

This was discovered in the first week of August 2014 by Hold Security LLC, a Milwaukee-based company that sells information-security and risk-management services.

About Botnets

The word botnet is a combination of the words robot and network and is a collection of Internet-connected programs communicating with other similar programs in order to perform tasks.

Botnets are networks of zombie computers that have been infected with a computer virus. Any time an infected user visits a website, botnet can be commanded to test that website to see if it is vulnerable to a well-known hacking technique known as an SQL injection, in which a hacker enters commands that cause a database to produce its contents.

If the website proves vulnerable, criminals flag the site and return later to extract the full contents of the database.

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